A “lead” is a person or company, who may have interests in a firm's products or services. Marketing departments receive new leads through website visits, online or traditional advertisers, webinars, and other marketing campaigns. Millions of leads may be generated through different marketing channels.
Management of the large quantity of leads includes tracking leads, identifying high-quality leads to pass on to a sales department, identifying potential customers to nurture, as examples. Management of leads may be extremely time-consuming and difficult due to the sheer volume of the leads, the subjective way that people value each lead, and the fact that only a small number of the leads represent people or companies with a genuine intent to purchase. Furthermore, the lifecycle of a successful lead that generates a sale and, ultimately, revenue spans across both the marketing and sales departments. As a result, efficient management of leads over the lifecycle is also important to the sales department.
A lead management system today helps marketers manage a large quantity of leads. Existing systems embrace the concept of marketing and sales cycles by allowing a user to assign leads to predefined statuses. Some existing systems also allow the definition of rules that move leads from one status to another without human intervention upon fulfillment of certain conditions.
A lead goes through a sequence of stages before resulting in a purchase. From a firm's perspective, a lead first makes itself known to the firm (referred to herein as the known stage). Marketing staff may send emails, make phone calls, invite leads to webinars or road shows, and conduct other various marketing activities to engage and nurture the lead to a point where it is ready to make a purchase within a short period of time. The lead is then transitioned to the sales department (referred to herein as the sales accepted lead stage). Sales representatives contact the lead to determine whether there is a genuine intent to purchase. If so, the lead is transitioned to a sales accepted opportunity stage. When a purchase or sale is completed, the lead transitions to a customer stage.
The sequence of stages that leads go through forms the revenue cycle of a firm. Marketing and sales departments segment leads based on stages in the revenue cycle, so that leads in different stages are able to receive different levels of attention and treatment. The revenue cycle concept grows out of sales cycle and marketing cycle concepts, and is adopted by firms that seek to streamline activities and management in marketing and sales departments for superior revenue generations. Existing types of revenue cycle concepts in marketing/sales practices simply combine the marketing and sales cycles. As a result, they are visualized as a funnel of stages.
FIG. 1 illustrates a prior art sequence of lead stages represented as a funnel. The funnel 100 illustrates that fewer and fewer leads are able to progress to the later stages.